Internal Linking - Same page

[Will_Craig]

Is there any benefit in internally linking back to the same page? I have no other relevant pages in the site I can link to so wondering if it's worthwhile to use anchor text to link back to the same page?

[esendex]

Linking from a page back to itself has no benefit what-so-ever. A page has already benefited from the link juice coming to it, it cannot then pass that back to itself. Also, note that the first anchored text hold the most value, in fact a page back in 2008, Rand stated that it hold all the value:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/results-of-google-experimentation-only-the-first-anchor-text-counts

Good internal linking is based on getting from the home page to the internal page in the smallest number of links. Keep you site shallow to help the user easily navigate to the important pages on your site.

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/internal-link

And Finally, remember Google is based on user experience, this is something that does not benefit the user in anyway, that I can think of, so Google (and other SE's) will have made sure this hold no value to their algorithm.

Well, they're my thoughts.

[bradkrussell]

I agree with you on all points. Just curious why reporting tools like OSE include those links then? Is it in a way a no follow link? Ie a link with no link juice?

[esendex]

As far as I know, OSE is simply a tool that crawls your site and as many as it can, so if the link is there, it will report it. OSE doesn't tell you what juice is coming to you, if any at all.

So I would say it will probably report it as a followed internal link, if that's what the code says, (can't seem to get on OSE to explore further) but in terms of where the link juice goes, I'd say, as you said, it's "a link with no link juice"